If George Bush had been aborted he would have had to be invented by The Simpsons.

Whenever we watched those lips move we knew there was nothing going on behind those too-close-together eyes.

As though the neo-Cons had put a Deliverance in-bred into a thousand dollar suit, trained him how to wave and smile at the same time and given him a throat-box worked by Donald Rumsfeld.

This week, being quizzed on his autobiography, he tells us he saw nothing wrong with giving criminal suspects the virtual drowning technique called waterboarding.

We know it's torture. He thinks it's surfing.

I imagine most sane Americans feel pretty ashamed that their country twice voted in a buffoon who led it to two catastrophic wars and whose reckless tax cuts on the eve of a cataclysmic recession had the world staring into an economic abyss.

But reading what Bush has to say about events around the Iraq War I feel even more ashamed of my country's leader.

Bush reminds us that when Tony Blair faced losing a vote of confidence on the war in 2003, he told him to forget about sending troops to Iraq and concentrate on saving his government. Blair's response: "I'm in. If it costs the government, fine." Analyse that for a second. Labour is half-way through its second term, with so much work left to do for the people who elected it.

Any Labour leader with an ounce of passion for the party would be thinking: "The Tories are so split we could have a mandate to rule for the next seven years at least.

Imagine how we can change this land for the better."

Yet he was prepared to sacrifice that prospect, and the lives of so many servicemen, just to please a rogue right-wing president and a swooning American public who mistakenly perceived him as the new Churchill.

Contrast that with Bush's new claim that it didn't matter to him, and it doesn't matter to him now, what the British people thought of him. Why should it? We didn't elect him. If only our leader had felt the same way.

Bush says he feels sick whenever he thinks of the dodgy intelligence that claimed Iraq had WMD. Blair has given no such indication.

From his smug, "je ne regrette rien" performance before the Chilcott Inquiry, to his admission to Fern Britton that he'd have found a reason to remove Saddam regardless of WMD, he has brazened it out.

All he regrets is the damage to Brand Blair this side of the Atlantic. Hence the donation of his blood-money book profits to the British Legion.

As for his image in America, where the real money is, it couldn't be stronger.